Research Agendas for the New Millennium: Celebrating Methodological Diversity

Abstract

As the old century comes to an end and the new one begins, we can see a tendency to consider where we are as individuals, communities and nations. This is undertaken by both looking back at where we have come from and reflecting on where we might go. Whilst in some ways the turn of the century is a completely arbitrary boundary to use for such a purpose, the change seems to almost compel us to such reflection. In doing this we seek to make sense of what has passed and make plans for the future. In essence we seek to order our lives by labelling time and sorting our experiences. Historians demonstrate that the naming of time has always been commonplace, if also contested, perhaps as a way of making sense of the complexity of everyday life (Corfield 1996). As accountants of course we deal with issues of periodisation all the time. It forms the fundamental foundation of our calculations and is rarely cause for question. It is perhaps unsurprising that accountants are amongst those who are seeking to contemplate tire stale of their world as the new millennium approaches and this is one such attempt. The outcome of such reflections is manifest each year in the form of New Year Resolutions. The aim of this short paper is to argue the case for a New Millennium Resolution for the academic accounting community. That resolution is that we make active efforts to both encourage and value a broad range of approaches to research.

Citation

Broadbent, J. (1999), "Research Agendas for the New Millennium: Celebrating Methodological Diversity", Pacific Accounting Review, Vol. 11 No. 1/2, pp. 35-39. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb037924